There is no traffic, there is no obstacle. Wright hits eighty on the brief stretch of four-lane highway with his body singing, all gestures perfect, the blinker turned on with just a pinky, the foot lifting off the gas when he reaches the exit in an elegant wave to the future. The downgrade of speed is perfectly even. His chin when he changes lanes ticks over his shoulder like a dancer’s.
At the restaurant where he comes once a week Vincent takes the last bite of what he always orders, corned beef and hash. The light is the same, smoky and bluish through the stained glass that ribbons the windows. There’s no watch on his wrist, no clock he can see, but he knows that forty minutes have passed. That this is a skill other people don’t have, to feel the hour slivering by the minute, has escaped his memory. He could be locked away in the dark for days and know exactly.
It’s a bigger one, its own parking lot. Wright breezes through a foyer much the same, curving like a C to avoid a cluster of bodies who seem related, all smelling of dairy and sweat, all terminating around six feet in the same red hair. For five, they all say, when a hostess who is mostly the gum in her mouth asks how many. The photos above the bar are identical but arranged differently, the cash register with ornamental typewriter keys just like the other. He sees Vincent Kahn immediately, a person like any other person, a bald spot that looks as greasy in the light as the plate in front of him, empty but for a precisely folded napkin.
The person coming toward him has a look he’s never liked, a glance that’s wide but unfocused. There’s a smell, too, new sweat on old, blue-green dime-store soap, tobacco’s mean loiter on the body. He uses his hair in the same way she did, a curtain that gives him a dishonest advantage, an unmanaged part of himself that predicts many others. What was beautiful about her was never different from what was frightening.
Saying his name, pointing to himself as he comes down the carpeted aisle, Wright is aware of a vague impulse to raise both his hands, as though to communicate he is not armed. In pleated denim and a shirt so stiff it seems to hover outside his body, Vincent Kahn stands up and squints like someone trying to pretend he has not been asleep.
The boy’s handshake is barely that, his eyes the same blue as hers, a color you couldn’t trust for how it took on the surroundings. Before, writing that letter, taking that call, he believed there was something he might ask the boy about her. Now he sees the distance as precious and fought for, remembers that in knowing her his life had nearly lost its focus. Airplanes he let her fly, sleep he went without. His mouth tightens, his mind does.
Wright explains the matter of the mix-up as quickly as he can, the details all spliced with the word sorry. Vincent Kahn makes a small gesture with his wrist, the pillow of his palm turning out, as though screwing in a lightbulb.
“I already ate, but you should feel free,” Vincent says.
As the boy orders, apple brown betty, CeeCee who always serves him writing this down in enormous, bubbly blue letters, the cap of the pen shot through as it always is with splinters, Vincent looks at his face. The bridge of the nose, the spacing of the teeth, the length of the philtrum. He believes it’s important to consider them separately, apart from any instinct, apart from any feeling, all of which say no. The dessert is on the table in a minute, less, and now he considers the way the fingers hold the fork, the way the hand moves its fingers.
“Thirty-five hours from San Francisco, something like that?”
“I added some. I wanted New Mexico, I wanted to pass back through Texas. I used to live there.”
Wright adds this as a kind of test, to see how closely Vincent Kahn read, to try to knit them together more. But the man across from him goes on to discuss roads, to name-check highways and landmarks. He mentions the surprising green of Arkansas; he cuts a hand vertically, from the height of his shoulder to the surface of the table, to indicate some directness of route. The letters seem to have as much influence, at the table between them, as another country, remote in time and weather, ruled by a different system. He tries anyway, his anxiety having reached its exhaustion, no longer compelled by the possibilities of rejection.
“I’ve never met anybody who knew her—before.”
“Me neither, or at all. I didn’t know her long.”
“How long was it?”
“A year? Less? More.”
It’s the first lie he’s told in a long time, Vincent, and he does it cutting one shoulder forward, his fingers spread on the plastic in front of him. He knows the answer exactly but thinks of anything else to keep it from his face. A bicycle he’d loved and crashed, brick red with blue fins, age six. The only woman he’d touched in the decade after Elise, friend from the golf course, lights out.
Wright digs his chin into the corduroy collar of his denim jacket, smelling the salt of the fog on it, feeling the difference of their lives as completely as he would water all around him. He had known they would be strange to each other, he had hoped they would make perfect sense. One more question, he tells himself, and if it goes unanswered it’s no harm—he won’t have any more than he did before. To imagine your mother before she was your mother, he thinks, at the same time he thinks everything else—to imagine your mother before she was your mother is to know the parts of yourself that were never a matter of your will or trying. It was awful to be made of anybody else, and it was all he wanted. The waitress, her denim hip nearly checking the table as she passes by with her platter of baked potatoes, looks back and forth between their faces, two times, four. A table past she stops and turns and opens her mouth to speak, but doesn’t.
“Were you surprised? By what happened to her.”
“Surprised is not the word I would use.”
Looking at the boy’s face, the features and how they work together, he feels the relief of it, something he had to see for himself.
“Your mother was a gifted person. She could find a reason to learn anything, all California tanagers in the space of an evening, takeoff and landing as fast as most pilots. Always a book. She never wanted to know less than anybody, never wanted it to be said she had not tried. The horse, what was it called—”
“Lloyd.”
“She rode it standing up a mile on the bet of a nickel once, sprained her wrist. People thought the proud one was her sister, what was her—”
“Charlie.”
“Yes. But she was just as much so and more patient, willing to give up more in the short term.”
“She flew planes?”
“And she kept a good secret, apparently. That I knew. Yes, we flew some.”
“What is the word you would use?”
“You look like her. Almost exactly.”
It’s less like hearing the words, you look like her, than eating them. He feels them in his body, parts of himself he’ll never see. Wright understands now that Vincent Kahn won’t speak the underside of it, the answer inside the observation, just name the similarities as he must observe them. The color of your hair, he is explaining, your feet a little bowed, too, sorry for my saying. A scent from the waitress, knockoff Calvin Klein that comes in a spray can, the heft of it right but the last note metallic, sheds her as she speaks. Dessert or I guess you already had some, anything else, just the check. Over the shoulders of the first man on the moon are paper shamrocks ascending and descending in their hang from the ceiling, and Wright focuses on these, the slight movement under the fans. Is it a lie, is it one Vincent Kahn was always going to tell or did it come to him in this booth. Why write. Why come.
“New York, is it? You’re driving to.”
The boy’s disappointment looks like hers. Blows don’t land on the face but disappear, almost immediately, into the body. He’s striking, it’s undeniable, absorbent of light in the way the most beautiful women are, and the waitress sees it too, and keeps looking over at them from where she’s spraying down the curving glass case. Leaving his house he had told himself he was prepared for any outcome, a son who would make the rest of his life a long apology, baseball tickets by the ream, sleeping bags and fishing poles piled in the hall. Syndicated television, popcorn on the stove.
“Welcome to stay tonight, if you need.”
Why does he want him to sleep there? To make the humiliation longer, starve it until it dies? It’s a false offer, Wright decides, so he takes it, wanting, like his mother did, to push at the flimsiness of a façade. On their knuckles is the same patterning of hair, on their chins the impression of the same thumb.
“Love to. Follow you in my car.”
The drive Vincent does without thinking, losing her son behind him at one point and only realizing when he honks. He throws a hand out the window to apologize. But he can’t drive my Ford five blocks to the drugstore, his father’s friend had said. A turn signal is a sound he’s always hated, the clunky two-note stupidity of it. He waits empty minutes behind a station wagon with rear-facing seats. A boy with mucus trails the color of corn stares back, his fingers loose in his lap, his hair very clean.
Down Vincent’s cul-de-sac the trees are young, the houses low, the budget sedans wood paneled. In the windows are naïve craft projects, Popsicle-stick wreaths and Scotch-taped finger paintings, on the lawns miniature stovetops and shopping carts in kid-friendly plastic. The greatest luxury of the middle-class childhood, Wright thinks, right here—life so dependably familiar that the notion of running errands, feeding and being fed, could be reenacted with an imaginative twist. There are no sidewalks, just driveways and curbs, and the fences, slight and cosmetic, suggest there’s never really been a threat to any of this, never anyone who came and did not belong.
He has a can of hot dogs and cable with a number of channels and a good shower and he names these things aloud to no real response. To supply some sound he turns on the television. The president’s voice is one he likes, an actor’s training yes but a humble measure to it, only the necessary words. He’s heard the address already, three times or four, the Challenger disaster, news stations playing it on loop. After Bisson had removed the lemon from the command module, his point made, he had tossed it to him, backward and underhand, winking over his shoulder. He knew Bisson had seen his life both ways, precious because it was expendable. Her son, listening with a hand cupped to his mouth, is making an expression he can’t read. Some take comfort in seeing their faces in others, he thinks, they spend all their lives looking. It is a way of feeling the world has invited you here. But he was never this way—even as a boy, what he loved above all was the privacy of mornings, the theater of weather.
We’ve never had a tragedy like this, the president says, and Wright thinks of Braden, the way he keeps the number of the dead spring-loaded. There’s almost nothing to look at in the room, brown shag carpeted and furnished in muted oranges and greens, but the one framed photo that sits on the stone mantel. A grimacing boy pedals a bicycle midair, hovering a few feet above a pool. A few days before he left San Francisco, Wright had watched him scrawl the latest in glitter on poster board, 16,116. We mourn seven lives, the president says. Jacket still on, fists in his pockets, he laughs, the undeniable punch line of the number. He imagines two thousand crews of seven, men who smiled at him on the street or undid his metal button fly with their teeth, exploding one after the other, the shuttles failing again and again to fly straight.
“Something funny?”
“I’m sorry. Probably just exhaustion.” The room where Vincent Kahn leads him is as clean as it is empty. There is a mattress on a box spring, a nightstand with one drawer. He thanks him for the apple brown betty, he thanks him for the bed, he thanks him. With the door closed he examines the few things he can, the pale cotton curtains on pulley, a small, stiff towel on a mounted wooden ring in the connected half bath. The only question he could ask of the room is the drawer, and he resists it. In the living room the address continues, the president speculates on bravery. Because he knows the bed has been made with a precision he cannot replicate, he resolves to sleep atop and climbs on, shoeless. His right hand shoots out on its own, the fingers twist behind the wrist to pull the knob. Like somebody driving, his eyes stay straight ahead as he looks with his body. There’s nothing, he thinks. In a second he turns over and switches hands, places the flat of the left on the pine and scoots it back. A weight there, something with different parts, metal, Velcro, glass. The first thing he does with the watch is turn it over and blow the dust from the face, a bubble of some depth and heaviness. TACHOMETER, the outside ring says, tiny white capitals over numerals that go to five hundred. Circumscribed by the twelve minute markers are three smaller circles, the use of which he can’t guess, going to thirty, going to sixty, going to ten. The doubled band, Velcro, could reach around his wrist twice, and stitched on its inside is a label: plain, official. APOLLO/NASA. When he puts it in his pocket, cool and elegant among the crumbs and pennies there, he says I’m sorry to the alien room, less an apology for what he is doing than an admission of what he has done, the acknowledgment of what he won’t take back. A post office or pawnshop, near here or should he drive awhile, he doesn’t know. He will leave at five A.M., the rooms he passes through dark, the cul-de-sac at dawn taking on a glow piece by piece—the cheap plastic disc swing tied up in the tree becoming bluer, the saliva-worn tennis balls scattered by dogs appearing like Easter eggs under the bare hedges of rosebushes.
The judgment greets Wright as fact: there is nothing to be done about the way certain people come into the world, nothing to be done about the way the world comes easily to certain people.
Vincent had skimmed the letters for information, of which there was little. The final months with her, she had sometimes been cold and strange—Your life is a promontory you carved yourself and walked way out on, she said—and he had waved it away, her maudlin tendency. In two years, when the last letter comes, when he finds it waiting in his mailbox after a last trip to Edwards, he will read it carefully, more than once, not rising when the afternoon goes to turn on a lamp. For now he sits, listening to the television.
We’ve grown used to wonders in this century, the president says. It’s hard to dazzle us.
October 17, 1988
Dear Mr. Kahn,
I don’t talk to anyone about my mother. What I say is, she died. I never want to catch a look on somebody’s face as they talk to me and imagine it’s about her, like they’re trying to identify the ways in which who she was shows up in who I am. So I guess this was practice, writing to you, for a someday when I’ll pause between sips of water and say, like people do, and I’m always so jealous of how offhanded they can be, that reminds me of something my mother said. My mother had a dress just like that.
Less like a person and more like an event, is how I think of her. She was an accident I could not have avoided. Sometimes I ask if this is also how she thought of herself. The days before the bomb in the Village I saw it, however briefly. They were discussing the number of officers to be in attendance, a guest list that Randy had stolen somehow, and she said something like, a hundred and six, and flapped her palm open and shut to say, gone. Then the look on her face like a change in light, an old part of her almost coming through to say, what?
What frightens me the most about who she was at the end, the tendency I’m most afraid of having inherited, is how resigned she was to all of it. She behaved as though every shocking fact, the bombings, her face on the news, the most-wanted flyers in towns where we could only stop long enough to eat, was part of the same inevitability—speaking, also, as though she and I were equal victims of the same circumstance, using the word “we” in ways that made me beat my pillow. We’re both hungry, she would say, but it’s our job now to focus on just making it to the next place. During a thunderstorm we watched from a motel in Georgia, I suggested to her she go find the roof of the highest building and wait to be struck. My temper had become a part of how we lived, something factored into how long or hard a trip might become. We didn’t speak for four days.
They were farther apart toward the end, moments when she cried or begged and seemed to be looking for a way back into who she had been, and they passed like a sneeze. An hour later it would feel like a hallucination I’d had, her face returned to its rigid economy, creaseless and lightless.
If she hadn’t met Randy, would she have found her way to Shelter? I want to think no, although I know this doesn’t say great things about her constitution, Mr. Kahn, and I’d love to say great things about her constitution, particularly to you, whom I have reason to believe she loved, and who I have reason to believe humiliated her. I overheard her in a fight with Randy once, the first few months in the country, when she was saying, You’re like every other man. You love the woman who worships you, and the ones you respect you fuck like they’re trash. You love what you pity and destroy what you admire. I was stunned by this, the life before it must have referenced.
Was she against the war, yes. Was she angry. Was she wild. Was her life’s lack of structure what allowed her to change it completely. Yes, yes, yes. But my mother, Mr. Kahn, was the kind of person who reassured spiders as she carried them outside. She wore a button that said “Children Are Just Smaller People,” and wanted my opinion on everything, always, before I could even spell my name, and once let me paint what I know now was an incredibly valuable suitcase, a last gift from her father to her sister, with a very large and crooked portrait of a whale. She eschewed toy guns and once kicked Randy out of their bed for a night because he’d made me a slingshot. Is this the sort of person you imagine becoming a top twenty-five most-wanted domestic terrorist?
What happened in the brownstone in New York City was a distracted mistake. Whether it was my mother’s distraction that killed that man upstairs, the fault of Annabelle or Randy or some combination I don’t know, although I have my theories. My mother loved Randy, maybe in the same way she loved you, and by that I mean she loved the way he thought. I don’t know if it was ever about how he made her feel. It was about how he made her see. What he didn’t account for was how well she would see, better than he could, wider and farther and uninterrupted by rage. That she became the bigger star of Shelter was a deep shock to him, and even that she understood before he did, from where she was always standing beside him, a light hand on his elbow—how it would undo him. The image of a weaponized woman is a new one, I heard her say to him, during a sulky fit he had after Philadelphia brought her the fame it did, in the voice she had used to comfort me when another child had been cruel.
In the last months I knew her, in the motel rooms where she faded, my mother was a fount of American commercialism. Though she had spent years decrying the Television, talking about it in that vicious way—the Television has spoken, A true American consults first and last the Television—her position allowed her, finally, to understand its appeal. She mouthed the slogans in perfect mimicry. The electric pour seemed to be going both ways, from the television to her, from her to the television, the belief and its believer entwined ad infinitum, becoming interchangeable. If I had to choose the moment I lost her, Mr. Kahn, I couldn’t. But if I had to choose the moment in which I knew she was lost, it was this, her mouth soulless around a jingle. MY BOLOGNA HAS A FIRST NAME, IT’S O-S-C-A-R. Easily, this.
Even as a child I could understand why it was her and not Randy. He was incapable of hiding, from anybody, first of all himself. What woke him up in the morning was a litany of wrongdoings, those done by the country pressing on him as much as some cruel nickname that had followed him around his childhood playground. In the places where my mother could slip in undetected, hard to pin to a specific stratum, still adorned with certain formal gifts of her upbringing, Randy was obvious, all angles and ragged political patches. The war was on his face. She could put on a secondhand white overcoat, no buttons, all sash, and pass like a slightly unclean Lana Turner through the revolving doors of Brutalist high-rise municipal buildings. She could say beg pardon and ask for directions without anyone guessing what was ticking in her suitcase. Though she was the oldest of the women in Shelter, she looked the youngest, something if pressed she attributed to the inversions of yoga, and that she never wore underwear if she could help it.
One piece of Shelter’s agenda, often left out in the TV movie reenactments, was the rejection of monogamy. They felt that in the work they were doing the romantic-sexual attachment was anathema, a sure route to a weakened purpose. Randy railed at her later for how free she became, slipping from one cot to the next in the early morning sometimes, but he was the first adopter, disappearing for days with Annabelle and then barely shrugging when asked about it, as if discussing matters beyond his control, road closures or outdated laws.
The Philadelphia bombing, of which my mother was arguably the star, incensed him, though he talked about it as a failing of ideology, and he was the one who pushed for a change in the model, who rallied for the practice of evacuating these buildings to end. It’s not enough that they fear for their institutions, he said. They have to fear for their lives. He was the one who identified the officers’ dance that was to be the target of the bomb that blew up the town house. Fifty military officers and their wives. Tuxes and tulle.
She was not only the one who planted it, in Philadelphia, curtsying her way in with a typewriter case, more than convincing as the part of the stenographer, but also the voice on the memorandum that so many radio stations played. It was coy but forthright, feminine but unfaltering. Someone likened it to Marilyn. Let it be known that America is now subject to the same obliteration it has brought elsewhere, she said. Thank you and good night. She had come into life with all advantages and she had scorned them, and that was a compelling argument for something being very wrong with the heart of the country, of course more so than Randy, whose missing finger was too personal an injury, too clear a sign of the ways his country had hurt him, not clear enough about what it had turned him into. To be truly famous here is to have lost or gained everything, reversed positions completely. The photo that had surfaced of her, beaming astride Charlie’s horse, was in every paper.
The network of Shelter pay phones had almost completely regenerated by the time the AARRMW got ahold of her, and she believed, not entirely incorrectly, it had been changed to keep her from using it. She went on trying those numbers months after they went silent, something like thirty she had committed to memory. Randy had his wish; he became the star, and she went on trying those numbers months after they went silent, something like thirty she had committed to memory. I still hate to enter a Laundromat or arcade. The sound of the coins dropping sends me right to her fallen face.
The group that gave my mother her last stage had formed only shortly beforehand, and disbanded immediately after. The shock on their faces around her is part of what made the photo so famous—a mean, easy comment on how the radical left had eaten itself. She told them she would begin seated, or so went the account in the news. She said she needed to meditate before she gave any speeches, and I suppose that was not a lie. They were younger than I am now, but I have a hard time forgiving what they failed to see about her when she showed up. People in gas stations had seen it, at rest stops where she was afraid of the herds of children that bounded from station wagons.
Is your mom okay, said a woman on the bus I had watched stow three garbage bags of clothes in the undercarriage—leaving a bad relationship, she told me at a rest stop, keeping a hand over a very obvious bruise on her jaw. She must have seen how my mother insisted we switch seats four times, then fell so deeply asleep she tumbled, during a jerky lane change, into the aisle.
Would she have agreed to any protest that vaguely aligned with the way she’d been living before, to attach her face to a cause for the price of a bus ticket? It’s possible. The car she’d bought, unregistered, had broken down. Our money was gone. She’d sold a belt buckle of her sister’s, a figure on a horse with a lasso, the twist of rope spelling the words “WHAT FUN.” But like all other decisions she was making then, she agreed to the trip to Florida having eaten only what came from motel room vending machines, never having slept more than an hour at once. Every person we saw, in those days, was someone who would make the call the second she turned a corner. Dogs were suspect, their sense of smell. Birds too cheerful. The sun too bright, the window too big, the sheets too stiff, the water too cold. There was no part of the world left for her, was the way she was acting. I know now that this was because she had turned her curiosity toward leaving it.
I’m telling you because I don’t want you believing that what she did was some act of revenge toward you, that you were that big to her. Revenge is an act of pride, isn’t it? And pride is an act of self. It requires a person to believe they have been deprived of something they deserved. My mother, Mr. Kahn, no longer had any sense of what she deserved. She didn’t even have a sense of what she liked. On our last stop on the bus ride before we reached the cape, at the rest area where we were allowed ten minutes to stretch our legs in the aisles of a gas station, I watched her fill a cup of coffee with two packets of condensed creamer. She had always, with no exception and a fair amount of insistence, taken it black. When I pointed this out to her, she gave me a look of total guilt. I’m so sorry, she said, as if I’d be the one with the wrong taste in my mouth.
She had never loved the program, of course, and we took a bus to Quito to protest a parade for your friend Sam. She called Apollo Our Happiest Lie and said things like, Here’s our country, dressed to the nines while its house burns down. All my childhood, she simmered about the coverage it received, talked about how it was the same, the money that lit the rocket and the money that killed the children. Two sides of the same coin. It makes sense that a country destroying life on one planet would need to lay claims on another.
When we got to the cape, my mother asked me something she hadn’t in a long time, a question that for most of my life had given me a deep thrill: Would you like to take a walk? I never knew when it was coming, this question, and it usually followed a period during which some book or thought had kept her from me—she would have been quiet for hours, moving only to underline or scrawl in the margins. That she wanted my company after this had always seemed like the greatest compliment.
Passing the tents set up on the beach and the people tailgating in baseball caps, my mother looked at them with a kind of benevolence, like they were some hand-painted exhibit, quaint representations of simple, parochial lives. She was dressed more like she had when I was younger, in box-cut linen that diminished what was beautiful about her, and she asked me, as she always had when we started out, what I was thinking. I was sullen and I didn’t want to say and for ten minutes I kicked a beer bottle along the sand in front of us, rolling my eyes like even that was a tedious burden forced upon me. I wasn’t asking myself, Why isn’t she afraid of getting caught? Why aren’t her sunglasses on? She had her shoes, some drugstore espadrilles worn out the summer before, in her hand, and she started speaking in the automatic way people do when telling a story they know very well.
I don’t know if you’ll remember, she said. This was soon after we got here. Those couple weeks in Berkeley. Do you remember Karen and her baby Henry? He wasn’t as curious as a baby should be, I always thought. And he cried at anything. She was asked to leave soon after this, because of him. Anyway, there was this afternoon. Henry’d been left on the back porch in a bassinet, someone saying what he hadn’t gotten enough of was sunshine. The jelly for the mimeograph was on the oven, and I was stab-binding some poems written by the women of Shelter, and I didn’t know where you were, but this was before things became so strict, and I wasn’t worried. Then I heard the screen door open and saw you come through, carrying him. The remarkable thing was how you were holding him, textbook. All the women were mouthing at me: Has he ever held a baby? Has he?
I don’t know how you knew. It took me four months to lift you naturally, because it’s counterintuitive, holding a life that small—you have to start not with the heaviness in the torso, but the head, which can feel too downy, impossible to secure. You were inured somehow to the fragility of it. It’s one of the first things I remember when I think, Who is my son? It makes me believe you will know what you need in life, and that those needs will always include the happiness of others.
I understand now, Mr. Kahn, that this was the version of me she wanted to remember as she went, a boy who was likely to survive without her, one who was possibly better off. For a long time I worried I had lit the match, because the way the photo was composed somehow makes that case, and because in a bacterial, bodily way I had hated her. Claudette and James, for all their fear of difficult conversation, always had the time to remind me of my innocence. She did that to herself, they would say. She did.
My mother had the presence of mind, at least, to keep me from the demonstration, or to try. She had arranged for someone to look after me in the parking lot, a short college student named Brad who was pissed to be kept from the action. We were sitting in his car with all the doors open smoking a spliff and not talking. There were Buddhist prayer beads hanging from his rearview and in the seat pocket in front of me some porn magazine folded back and barely stuffed down. I could see most of the image, of a woman being fucked in two ways by two men, black and white, and the text said something about ebony and ivory. None of them were looking at each other. One of them had both her wrists. Her mouth was open too wide. The point seemed to be pain.
Brad turned on the radio, eventually, and closed his eyes like somebody alone. The noise of it seemed like my cue to exit. With the doors already open, leaving was just a matter of swinging my feet onto the asphalt and going. I don’t know how long until Brad realized I was gone, just that he didn’t come after me. What you see in that photo, a boy holding a match as he crawls back, a woman sitting with her palms faceup on her knees, is true and it isn’t. The peace on her face is less that than a total vacancy. Rather than cleaned out, abandoned. That match in my hand is one I took from her, ignoring the fact that a whole booklet remained, fighting, like the child I still was, with the small pieces as though they would change the whole. I know the papers speculated about the words that passed between us, what she whispered. Shadow shine, is what she said, which is how, when I was very small and living in another country, I referred to the ends of things, and how, finally, she referred to me.
She didn’t believe in it, what you spent your life on, but I don’t want you thinking that woman on fire had anything to do with you. That woman was empty of who she had been, someone invented a thousand times over in as many mirrors as she could find, and that was something her country allowed her to do.
We’re just very young, my mother would say, scanning the headlines of the papers she bought religiously, shaking her head. I didn’t understand then who she meant, that she could be talking about the nation as a whole. She had a tendency to see any system as living, a creature that might behave another way if only it could be enlightened to what waited for it. When she’d had too much to drink, my mother could be persuaded to perform the pliés and fouettés that had won ribbons in her childhood. She kept many of her gifts hidden, as women do, worried about what love their talent might keep them from. My mother hated her country, and she was a part of it.
Wright